1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing apparatus, an image processing method, and a program for image processing.
2. Description of the Related Art
A long-time exposure technique is common as a film-based photography or image capture technique. In this technique, exposure is continuously performed for a certain period of time such as several seconds to several tens of seconds or even over several tens of minutes.
The long-time exposure technique is also used to provide photographic representations as well as to adjust the brightness of a subject.
For example, night scenes are photographed with a long exposure time. Since the amount of light is low, the exposure time is increased to collect a sufficient amount of light to obtain shots of night scenes.
The long-time exposure technique may also be used for other purposes. For example, the aperture is intentionally set low or the image capture sensitivity is reduced to represent the motion of a subject or focus on a stationary object among moving objects.
A digital camera designed to perform long-time exposure by adding a plurality of images after an image capture operation is disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2005-354166.
Photographic techniques such as using a flash (flashlight device) during long-time exposure to achieve various effects such as first-curtain synchronization, second-curtain synchronization, and multi-flash are also common.